TOP STORY: ICT: Kenya’s seacom cable construction advances

Rwanda is set to benefit from this project and recently it signed up for a $24m World Bank project to connect its Internet national backbone to either the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) or the SEACOM Cable The construction of SEACOM’s undersea fibre-optic cable is in progress with the recent completion of initial works on the cable landing station sites in Kenya and Mozambique. SEACOM is a privately funded company with total African ownership estimated at 75 percent, while South African companies own half of the total equity. The company is rolling out 15,000 km fibre optic undersea cable, linking South Africa, East Africa and Ethiopia to India and Europe. The project is expected to be ready for exploitation by June 2009. Rwanda is set to benefit from this project and recently it signed up for a $24 million World Bank project to connect its Internet national backbone to either the Eastern Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) or the Seacom Cable. Brian Herlihy, SEACOM President, in a statement said: “The project is progressing in-line with our manufacturing and deployment schedules and we remain firmly on-track to go live in June 2009. We are particularly pleased with the recent groundbreakings in Kenya and Mozambique.” He added that, “this important milestone gave SEACOM an actual land-based footprint that will allow Tyco Telecommunications, our turnkey project contractor, to install the high-speed optical transmission equipment at these sites soon.” “With only eight months to go before the system is ready for service, SEACOM remains set to be the first cable to connect east and southern Africa to the rest of the world with plentiful and inexpensive bandwidth”. Construction of seacom cable has already started in Maputo and installation of prefabricated cable station buildings has also commenced while in Mombassa foundations are beginning for similar prefabricated stations, which will be ready for installation on site in December. These containerised cable station modules were shipped from New Jersey to Africa in September. The remaining cable stations for South Africa and Tanzania are said to be on their way to Africa. All of SEACOM’s high-performance submarine transmission equipment is said to have been shipped from the factories and on its way to the cable stations. According to the company, nearly 90 percent of the cable has been manufactured. Ends

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TOP STORY: ICT: Kenya’s seacom cable construction advances